Hello
Perhaps someone could help me out here. I have just bought an unused PVR secondhand. All works ok BUT it still has the old V.47 software which as we all know was "duff". Panny seen not to have sent out the new .57 version for a long time so any ideas how I can get it. I have two others in my home with the new software hence can get at the Hard drives. Do you think I could copy the disc contents from one to another.
I am fully PC literate and an engineer so have the required experience to physically do it but I do not know how the drives are formatted.Has anyone out there looked at the HDD contents on a windows PC ??.
Thanks

Peter

Just in case you're still listening ...


Don't let a Windows PC near the drive !

I did look at what's on the drive a long time ago, it runs a version of Linux and is formatted with two partitions in EXT2 format. One partition holds the OS and the other holds the recordings.

IF you have some basic Linux skills (or know someone who does), then you can copy the later software from one disk to the other - it's not very big. BUT, I can't remember what sort of bootloader it uses, and if you don't get that right then it'll never boot ! For that reason it would be wise to make a bitwise image of the whole disk before attempting anything so that you can restore it to exactly the state it was originally.

You don't need to install Linux, download one of the bootable disks like Knoppix.

Simon---if you are still watching.
I was scanning the Panny tu cth100 thread the other day when I came across this old post of mine with your esteemed reply. Your words of wisdom sparked my old brain into gear as I have been dabbling in Knoppix Linux for a short while now so this now became a challange. I was lucky in finding the exact 80Gb Seagate drive on E bay and I "googled" disc cloning in linux and found a single one line command that would make an exact copy of the disc with the new Panny software on it including all the boot details. To cut a long story short it worked a dream so I now have my third PVR running with the latest v0.57 software.
So thanks again for your trigger.

Glad it helped someone. Yes, if you have an identical drive it's trivial to clone a disk - "dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy bs=1024k" would be my first choice for that (x and y would have to be whatever the disks appeared as). More fun would be using a bigger drive, I think I'd still do a bitwise copy (which would setup the bootloader and software), then resize the big partition that holds the recordings.

Reviving a 5 year old thread!

Pafos or SimonHobson, I've just received an old TU-CTH100. I stupidly removed the hard drive and formatted in windows thinking I could easily just format it back for use in the PVR. Would you by any chance still have the image of the original drive setup? I've formatted it back to EXT2, but ofcourse need to put the software on it and probably the bootloader too..... If you could upload the image somehwere for me to download, I would very much appreciate it! Thanks.